Say the place name, Tennessee, a name forever locked in the tears of an inglorious past that trailed into the rivers, begging passage to the salt of the oceans.

From the first people to the first Europeans, from the first slaves to the last refugees, the rivers connect us.

Qamra Muhammad, 14, has clay from the bottom of the Mississippi River smeared on her face while ...more

Qamra Muhammad, 14, has clay from the bottom of the Mississippi River smeared on her face while playing in the river during a guided canoe trip into Memphis.

Mike Brown / USA TODAY NETWORK - TENNESSEE

Rivers are the sums of their opposing banks. They are commerce and recreation. Barriers and escape routes. Sources of food and waste receptacles. We dam them and they leave their banks. Rivers don't care.

Beautiful and dangerous, they act as moving reminders of the plasticity of matter. Shape-shifting their banks, they allow us to bear witness to geological evolution, finding ways to teach us lessons in both patience and urgency.

Rivers have the capacity to erode the past, drown the present and carry us to our future. They are as mutable as we are fallible, and that may be why we are drawn to their banks and feel the kinship of the currents.

Rivers are the conduits of our dreams.

Tennessee, the state and its people, remain as inextricably linked to our rivers as we are to soil and stone.

Sarah Ferrell, left, 19, of Dickson, and Hannah Gentry, 22, of Dickson, stop to enjoy the view of ...more

Sarah Ferrell, left, 19, of Dickson, and Hannah Gentry, 22, of Dickson, stop to enjoy the view of the Harpeth River on Sept. 2, 2016, in Kingston Springs, Tenn.

Andrew Nelles / The Tennessean

Our abundance of fresh waterways creates a crazed landscape of springs, streams and creeks. They in turn feed the broad, meandering ribbons that softly cleave the state’s three grand divisions. We speak like rivers.

East Tennessee babbles in cold, clearwater tenors, reflecting light like still-run whiskey. Rivers fall with steep, untrusting urgency. They cascade and reel in small drops, joining to form a roaring bass line. They thunder-shake the boulders strewn in their way.

Moving west, where mountains give way to plateaus, the land is pushed from below by the backs of unseen giants. Water seeks its level, and a new mean carves deep canyons that fracture the edges of the land.

Middle Tennessee’s low-slung hills are cut and channeled by the creeks and rivers that gouge the hollows and carve steep faces of limestone. Gravel bars are convening places for the detritus of time, accruing on the inside edges of omega bends, giving audience to the silent bluffs.

Rachael McCampbell, right, host a party for friends in a creek behind her Leiper's Fork, Tenn. home ...more

Rachael McCampbell, right, host a party for friends in a creek behind her Leiper's Fork, Tenn. home on July 16, 2016. Outdoor chairs and tables are placed in the water for the "creek party". "I think the best way to fully enjoy the creek is to actually pull a chair out in the middle and sit there beneath the trees with your feet in the water. Whenever I have company, and the weather is warm enough, I like to put furniture in the creek and enjoy the environment that way. It's definitely a lot more work to bring down food, grills, chandeliers, tablecloths, candelabras, the fire pit etc. and put them in the creek. But the end result is worth it when you see your guests' faces light up," said McCampbell.

Shelley Mays / The Tennessean

With few exceptions, almost all of the riparian roads lead to the Cumberland and the Tennessee. Those are the great basins that drain the state, connecting the three cultural provinces from east to west, south to north.

Further still, our western border contorts to the turns and whims of the most grand, the Mississippi. It trundles and roils, as muddy and wide as the delta fields it leaves behind.

The people of West Tennessee swallow sounds, channeling their words into deep eddies that trap emotions, eventually releasing them into blue song. Opaque waters lap at the soft banks, spilling truths by the bar while oxbow lakes lay within sight of the current, imprisoned by the silt deposits of other lands far away.

We are drawn to the rivers because water removes us from the relative safety of our dirt-born lives. Rivers are an escape from the mundane, from the hours we churn on land. They challenge our reference points of balance and the horizon.

That is the ultimate riddle of the river. When we call nature, "Nature," we have crept to a place where we see it as something apart from who we are. When we stand on the bank, and the water flows past, it is something other than us. Only when we join the flow, feel the current and are buoyed by our imaginations, do we step back into ourselves. Only then does the fixed point on land appear to move.

All the while, the river flows on in constant renewal, forever destined to carry the blood and dreams of our sons and daughters.